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James Prior's Life of Oliver Goldsmith “More National (to Ireland) than Personal”: James Prior’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1837) Norma Clarke Biography, Volume 41, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 48-70 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2018.0008 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690278 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] “MORE NATIONAL (TO IRELAND) THAN PERSONAL” JAMES PRIOR’S LIFE OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1837) NORMA CLARKE In 1837 James Prior, an Irish-born naval surgeon whose well-received biogra- phy of Edmund Burke had appeared in 1824, published a biography of Oli- ver Goldsmith. Like the Memoir of the Life and Character of Edmund Burke, Prior’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith was generally well received. Among the praise, however, were a few demurrals, most notably from John Forster in The Exam- iner. Forster criticized Prior for what he considered his pedantic accumulation of detail. Prior, Forster wrote, “wanders away from his subject at every second or third page” (Review 819). When Prior did return to Goldsmith, there were rewards for the reader, and Forster admitted to feeling “sincere gratification” by the time he reached the end of the two stout volumes, but he wished he could have satisfied his interest “without the penalty of stumbling at every other page over Carolan the Irish bard, or Mr Burke and his schoolfellows, or Mr Contarine and all his connections, or Mr Lachlan Macleane, or Dr James Grainger, or Mr Edward Purdon . or Doctor Glover, or heaven knows how many Misters and Doctors beside” (Forster, “Literary” 819). Forster was keenly interested in Goldsmith and some ten years later went on to write his own biography, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848), drawing on Prior’s research. Forster’s book was easily as long as Pri- or’s, even if what Forster characterized as “superfluous passages” in Prior had been “unsparingly omitted” (Forster, Review 5). A second edition in 1854 also included a detailed preface and introductory notes defending his work against Prior’s complaints of piracy and asserting its superiority. In Forster’s view, as can be seen from the examples of “Misters and Doctors” who stood in the way of his clear view of Goldsmith, Prior had paid far too much at- tention to Goldsmith’s Irish connections and associations. He had failed to discriminate between important and unimportant matter. Forster explained that he had seen his task as a biographer to transform “an indiscriminate and Biography vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2018 © Biographical Research Center Clarke, “More National (to Ireland) than Personal” 49 dead collection of details about a man” into what he called “a living picture of the man himself surrounded by the life of his time” (Forster, Life and Times viii, emphasis in original). The result was universally hailed as a great suc- cess. Goldsmith “stands before us in the vividness of reality,” said the Quar- terly Review, praising Forster’s “acute and genial comments,” by which he had “assigned to the mass of disjointed facts their true significance” (Elwin 206). Forster’s comments, the “genial” tone of his writing, were valued for knitting together and giving “true significance” to the particulars of Goldsmith’s life. Forster’s approach, as Peter Cunningham declared in the Athenaeum when welcoming the first edition in 1848, had resulted in “a real biography—on a new, and to our thinking good, principle” (405). John Forster’s biography of Goldsmith became immensely popular. It was reprinted many times throughout the nineteenth century, often in condensed versions, as the 1855 edition’s preface states, to “bring it within reach of a larger number of readers” and with lively woodcut illustrations (Forster n.p.). Along with another popularizing biography that drew on Prior’s original re- search, the Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849) by the American Washington Ir- ving, Forster’s biography helped shape the public view of Goldsmith and his works. James Prior’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith was never reprinted. Hard to get hold of, it is not much read and is seldom cited except by Goldsmith special- ists. It is worth returning to, however, for at least two reasons. Firstly, because the attention paid to Irish writers was an explicit part of Prior’s agenda, as it had been in his Life of Edmund Burke, whom he introduced as the most distinguished statesman of an age of great men and the greatest genius Ire- land had produced. Just as Burke had been “the Irish orator,” so for Prior Goldsmith was “the Irish Poet”—though this was not a designation in use in Goldsmith’s lifetime, unlike “the Irish orator” for Burke. Prior’s biographies tell us something about the place of Ireland in English politics and culture in Prior’s own time of research and writing, the 1820s and 1830s, when Irish issues were occupying people’s minds, as well as during Goldsmith’s lifetime, 1728–1774, when, broadly speaking, they were not. It is illuminating also to look at the objections Prior made when Forster published his biography and the ensuing controversy that led Forster to write his preface and introductory notes to his second edition in 1854, because this conflict, in turn, invites us to think about the place of Ireland in English politics and culture in the 1840s and 1850s. Secondly, the controversy captures an important disagreement in early biographical practice. What the Athenaeum called “a new, and to our thinking good, principle” did not seem good to James Prior. He felt that he had been robbed. The principle on which he had pursued his research and written his biography did not include making a gift of his findings to another 50 Biography vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2018 writer. Nor did he think his Life of Oliver Goldsmith was an “indiscriminate and dead collection of details” but a careful, scholarly investigation pursued diligently over many years at considerable personal expense. The materials he had collected were, in his opinion, his property, and their having been pub- lished in a book did not make them less so. In choosing for his subjects the two most prominent Irishmen in Eng- lish political and cultural life in the eighteenth century, James Prior had a point to make about their contribution and, by implication, about that of the many Irish, like himself, who left Ireland and made their careers in Eng- land. The impassioned but dignified terms in which he objected to Forster’s biography—in a long letter to the Literary Gazette, he argued that his prop- erty had been “transplanted” and “appropriated” and that his pages had been “pillaged” (Letter 375)—carried with them the larger history of colonialism and exploitation that characterized English relations with Ireland, in which the plantation of settlers and appropriation of property by government de- cree was experienced as pillage. Forster for his part was stung by what he considered an unwarranted attack. The terms in which he responded seem, similarly, to have been drawn from a deep history of colonial rule in which the Irish were stereotyped as violent and uncontrolled, intellectually confused and lacking in manners. Forster, asserting superiority, deplored Prior’s “ill grace,” “vague abuse,” “unprovoked attacks,” and—a word often used about Goldsmith—his “absurdities” (“Goldsmith Controversy” [July 29] 507). He insisted that he had been drawn unwillingly into controversy because Prior had attacked him “on grounds as unjustifiable and in terms as insolent as may be found in even the history of literature” (Forster, Life and Times vii). He protested that “no two books so utterly unlike each other were ever before written on the same subject” (xxv). James Prior’s intentions in his Life of Oliver Goldsmith were made explicit in his opening remarks. He began by explaining that although Goldsmith was acknowledged as a major writer, no full-length biography had yet ap- peared in print. In the sixty years since his death there had been “notices,” “recollections,” anecdotes, and reminiscences aplenty, and memoirs were ap- pended to collections of his works, most notably in 1801 by Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, the English friend Goldsmith had tasked to write his bi- ography and who collected materials over several decades—but none of these were more than “sketchy outlines” of his life. It was an unsatisfactory situa- tion. Goldsmith “stands alone in our literature,” Prior wrote in his preface, “for having produced some of the best Poems, one of the best Novels (in the opinion of all foreigners the very best), many of the best Essays, some of the best plays, and in the estimate of Dr Johnson . some of the most useful Clarke, “More National (to Ireland) than Personal” 51 Histories.” For such an important figure to have been remembered by no more than a “biographical preface” that offered no considered assessment of his genius demanded explanation (viii–x). For Prior, that explanation was to be found in Goldsmith’s Irishness. Ireland, Prior pointed out, had produced many eminent writers: divines, philosophers, statesmen, poets. Little was known of them; few had had their lives written. Prior situated Goldsmith in a genealogy of Irish poets from the Earl of Roscommon through Sir John Denham, George Farquhar, Samuel Boyse, John Cunningham, Thomas Parnell, and Thomas Southerne, and de- fined them all as writers “of whom we know less than their reputation de- serves.” Why was this? Had the Irish failed to honor the talent they produced? Were they “lukewarm” (Prior, Life and Adventures vii) toward their great men? No, Prior explained, they were not indifferent to the fame that had been earned by high abilities.
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